The Ritual of Düd
by GIRL IN STORY
Summary: Richie proposes to Eddie.


Part of the Phuket-verse.

* * *

The hardest part of proposing was keeping it a secret from Eddie.

Richie wished he could have proposed to Eddie before they got psychic, but that just wasn't in the cards.

Speaking of cards…

Richie was so proud of his proposal idea that he almost let it slip out of sheer excitement. He ordered a create-your-own-reel-viewer. It was like the View-Masters from their shared childhood, but he got to pick the pictures.

They started out typical Trashmouth: some candids and behind-the-scenes photos from _The Glittering_, and more recently, _Headshot_. Eddie was still working from home, which often meant working from set, and Richie insisted on a full backstage pass for his "emotional support boyfriend." Eddie would have protested more if he wasn't so weak for Kraft™ Services and Richie using the B word.

Next came the group shots. Some cast shots, but mostly the Losers.

Then just Richie and Eddie.

A dick pic to make him blush.

And the last slide.

_Will you marry me?_

Eddie owned a View-Master back in the early eighties, when they had only just begun to be marketed to children. Before that, the reels were usually of nature scenes. The kind of thing Stan would have liked. Eddie's reels were all stills from E.T., and Batman. He and Richie had spent countless afternoons on each other's beds, passing the View-Master back and forth, lying with their heads together to facilitate the transfer.

Mostly, Richie was proud of his proposal idea because he wouldn't have to make eye contact or speak.

He was still fucking _terrified_, despite hearing Eddie think, "_I love you," _upwards of twenty times a day, and he didn't want Eddie to think he was terrified of their future together. That was the easy part.

The hard part wasn't asking Eddie to marry him, or waiting for Eddie's answer. The hard part wasn't even keeping it a secret.

The hardest part of proposing was believing any of it was real.

Richie was working on it in therapy. School had traumatized him too much for the psychoeducational model of DBT to be a comfortable fit, despite its effectiveness for Eddie. He eventually settled on a bobblehead shrink who let him ramble about killer clowns and pretend they were only in his nightmares.

Dr. Smith never appeared to be fazed by anything, and when Richie asked, "What's it gonna' take to set your phasers to stunned, Doc?" she replied, "You not slouching during our sessions," without missing a beat. She reminded him of Stan.

They had been working on his dissociative episodes. Richie had thought they were a symptom of the CTE until the scars in his brain went away and the feeling of remote-controlling his own body remained.

Sometimes Richie wondered, "Is this real?" and it was like pink elephants. He couldn't think of anything else. (It didn't help that his nightmares about Pennywise actually _had _pink elephants.)

It was happening more the closer they got to September. He was planning to propose on their (almost) shared birthday, because at least that would be easy to remember.

Dr. Smith pointed out that he was still compensating for his no-longer-existent memory loss, but Richie pointed out that he was still an alcoholic.

September came, and so did the Losers. Bill made them a cake that said IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY(S) in Impact font and black frosting. Mike gave them a recording of him reading their favorite book (Going Postal by Terry Pratchett), because the Loser's had learned that his voice had a calming effect on all of them. They couldn't tell if it was because of the magic or just because he sounded so much like the All State Guy.

Bev and Ben gave them a fucking _puppy_. Their dog had apparently knocked up a naked mole rat, because the thing was half-hairless, but its face was covered in whiskery moles. It had an overbite, a pot belly, and ears like an elf.

Richie and Eddie named it Dobby, and immediately bought three-hundred dollar's worth of shit for it on Amazon, even though Ben and Bev had already supplied the necessities.

The party went on for forty-eight hours, before they collapsed in a puppy pile on the living room couch. (Richie and Eddie had bought two three-piece sectional sofas for that exact reason.) Eddie was on top of Richie, with Dobby on top of him. Dobby was fast asleep, but Eddie was still blinking sleepily at Richie.

"Happy birthday," he slurred.

Shit.

He was too drunk to consent.

"Consent to what?" asked Eddie. "Because if you think we're having sex with all of our friends in the house, you've still got brain damage. You're famous. They could blackmail you so easily."

"_Please,"_ thought Richie. "_Like being caught with you would be anything but a brag. Stop listening to my thoughts."_

"_You're letting me."_

"_I'm drunk."_

Richie had to be drunk, because otherwise he would start to get _ideas_, and there was something about the _idea _of Richie Tozier _marrying _Eddie Kaspback that made him doubt the ontological structure of the known universe.

"_So go to sleep."_

"_Not yet," _thought Richie. "_I've got something for you."_

"I thought we agreed the sofas were our gifts for each other," said Eddie, already furrowed-brow furrowed even more. He could even make wrinkles look cute, the fucker.

"Yes, you insufferable grownup, but this was only thirty bucks," said Richie, like that was a sales point. It was technically true. Bev hadn't charged him a thing for the ring. He was repaying her with his body. (As a model for her new clothing line.)

He picked up Dobby, then Eddie, and set them down in the warm crater his butt had left behind. The boxes were hidden in Richie's collection of arcade tokens, which Eddie refused to touch because, "Arcades are full of germs. I've been telling you this since we were kids. You basically grew up in a petri dish, Richie."

Richie slipped the smaller box in his pocket and handed the larger one to Eddie. It took him a few minutes to unwrap, because Dobby tried to help. They had woken her up, but the other Losers were still fast asleep, innocently percolating their hangovers.

Eddie pulled out the reel viewer and a soft smile settled on his face. "_I remember this. We had the Batman ones. Do you remember? This one's different though. Is it a new company making them?"_

"_Probably," _thought Richie. "_But this one's different because you can design your own reel."_

"_Oh?" _Eddie inserted the reel and held the viewer up to his face. Between his facial scar and the ocular-shape of the viewer, he looked a little like Arnold Schwarzenegger from that scene in Terminator 3 where he put on the stripper's sunglasses.

The smile turned into a laugh, and then… a blush, and then…

Richie opened the smaller box and got down on one knee.

The viewer was shaking as Eddie set it carefully on the couch. Dobby could read a room about as well as Richie, because she was trying to stick her tongue up Eddie's nose. Like all the way up. Richie was pretty sure she licked his brain at one point.

Eddie gently pushed Dobby down, before reaching forward to knock the ring box out of Richie's hands. Richie, who had been a solid 65% sure that Eddie would say yes, began to have both some serious doubts about his psychic abilities _and _another dissociative episode. Then Eddie was kissing him.

When they pulled apart, Eddie ducked down to retrieve the ring from underneath the sofa.

"_Is this a poison ring?" _he thought, surprised, but not upset, not yet.

"_In case you gave it back." _Richie would have blamed the psychic abilities for his lack of filter, but the latter far predated the former.

"Not funny," Eddie whispered. "Why is it not funny, Richie?"

"Because my martyr complex scared my boyfriend a whole heck of a lot," Richie recited, even though he was pretty sure Eddie only made him memorize it because of the B word.

"Um," said Richie, but it was too embarrassing to ask out loud. "_Was that a yes?"_

"_Oh, Richie." _The fondly-exasperated tone of Eddie's thoughts did as much to assure Richie as the, "_Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes_," of Eddie channeling his inner Stefon, and Richie was so fucking happy that he didn't care if it was real, because it was real to _him_.

"_I think I'm an existentialist," _he thought, stupidly.

"_Therefore you are," _thought Eddie, not stupidly at all, despite the total non-sequitur, or maybe he had been reading Richie's thoughts again.

"_In that case..." _thought Richie, "_It wasn't funny because my martyr complex scared my fiancé a whole heck of a lot."_

Richie had never expected to find an F word he liked more than the original. Based on the return of Eddie's blush, he didn't mind it so much either. Eddie kissed him again, leaning forward, so he wouldn't crush Dobby, who had squirmed between their bodies, like a chaperone at a middle school dance.

"_So why a poison ring?" _Eddie thought. The nice thing about being psychic was that they didn't have to stop kissing.

"_They're also called pill box rings,"_ thought Richie, and they stopped kissing, because Eddie laughed so loud he scared the dog.

Someday Eddie would get around to opening it.

Poison or pill box rings had been used throughout history to carry everything from the titular substances to perfume, locks of hair, or devotional relics.

Eddie's ring contained neither poison nor a pill (although Richie had exercised the sum total of his self-control in an effort not to include a prank Viagra in his marriage proposal), but a View-Master cell.

Not a whole reel, just one snipped-out cell. You could only see the image if you held it up to the light and squinted, and you wouldn't get the 3-D effect, which was a shame really, because that cell was Richie's favorite. (At least the dick pic was 3-D).

He'd found the reel in an old box of Polaroids and photo booth pictures that had travelled with him, unopened, from Derry to New York and New York to LA. The rest of the reel had been damaged beyond repair, but that single cell was intact.

It was from Eddie's Batman reel. Specifically, it was Batman and Robin in "The Purr-fect Crime." In the two-part episode, Catwoman lowered Robin into a tiger pit (after covering him in catnip), and Batman swooped in at the eleventh hour to save his partner from her clawed clutches.

The cell was from earlier in the episode, when Robin was taken down by a domestic shorthair with poison on its claws. (It was a tough episode for Robin.) Batman had just revived him and was holding him in a typically homoerotic embrace.

Richie had spent a lot of time looking at that cell, thinking about the boy lying next to him, and dreaming about a day they could live together in a tricked out mansion, just like Batman and Robin.

"_Oh!"_

"What's wrong?" asked Richie.

"_Stop panicking. I just remembered..."_

Eddie ducked under the couch again, but this time he retrieved the Bucket O'Medical Records, as Richie called the banker's box of discharge papers and consent forms from his days as a walking, talking, medical miracle.

Well, a stumbling, slurring medical miracle.

Richie wanted to burn it, ceremonially, but Eddie had some issues with ceremonies since The Ritual of Düd, and he insisted on keeping it, just in case. Mike had offered to store it along with his Pennywise research. He was going to take it with him when he left.

Richie refused to touch the Bucket O'Medical Records, because honestly, he had also scared himself a whole heck of a lot, and—

Oh!

"_You didn't!"_ he accused, but Eddie was sitting up, smiling, and holding…

A ring.

It was three carrots.

Richie wouldn't have cared how many carrots it was, but it was a gold band with three orange-diamond studded _carrots_ with emerald stems.

"_I figured you'd want to talk about it in your show," _thought Eddie, and it was Richie's turn to kiss him. It turned out Richie was crying, so the kiss was even messier than ones Dobby kept trying to give them, although there was a _little _less tongue.

It turned out the hardest part of proposing was not having sex immediately afterwards, because all of your friends were in the house, you were famous, and they could blackmail you so easily.


End file.
